The way some teams from our study collaborated in these online hackathons confirms what is found in literature about collaborative work concerning small groups between two and five people often engaging in mixed-focus collaboration (i.e., synchronous and asynchronous work), with team members frequently shifting between individual and shared activities [1]}. Synchronous calls – either continuous or recurring – were fundamental to increase awareness, which is another important concept in collaborative work. Although that term has not been defined and used consistently [2]}, for our context we will consider that having awareness information is required to have a shared understanding of each other's activities and to coordinate group activities as a whole [3]}. Such information sharing is related to the team's collaboration readiness. Teams that kept continuous synchronous communication particularly caught our attention. Those were teams that had previously established a common ground (e.g., worked before in another hackathon, knew each other since kindergarten). They seemed to have more awareness than teams that did work in parallel and just synchronized occasionally. These continuously open audio calls mimic radical co-location [4]} by giving a sense of virtual co-location [5]}, or perhaps radical virtual co-location considering the intense synchronous online collaboration. This approach for communication was also the preference of synchronous verbal conversation in a controlled study about hybrid collaboration [6]}. However, two hackathon teams complained about the continuous exposure to these online calls as something occasionally disturbing. This can be explained as the need that some people may have to create their personal audio territories so they can temporarily disconnect from shared group audio territories [6]}.
The need to break out is real. The cognitive load of video calls also may lead to what has been called Zoom fatigue [8]} – a sort of mental exhaustion due to excessive exposure to synchronous video calls. Despite the reported problems, we believe this way of working helps to prepare online hackathons participants who are less experienced in distant collaborative work, so they can be ready for the likely scenario of post-COVID hybrid workplaces [9]}, where members of the same team may be either physically at the place or working remotely and need to rely on similar tools and approaches to performing teamwork.
